Replacing setuid with file capabilities

[Andrea Corbellini]

Hello,

As many of you already know, there are some setuid executables in Ubuntu
that perform very specific tasks and do not need many special privileges
(ping and traceroute are just two examples). My proposal is to remove
their setuid flag and set the file capabilities they need through
setcap(8). This will indeed reduce the risk of privilege escalation.

I think this is the right time to start discussing about this feature
because 12.10 is four releases away from the next LTS and the risk of
committing serious mistakes is lower.

So, what do you think? Is it something that we could do for the
Q-series?